Brythonic Languages - History and Origins

History and Origins

The modern Brythonic languages are generally considered to all derive from a common ancestral language termed Brittonic, British, Common Brythonic, Old Brythonic or Proto-Brythonic, which is thought to have developed from Proto-Celtic or early Insular Celtic by the 6th century BC.

There are a number of alternative hypotheses, none of which has found wide acceptance. Mario Alinei denies the existence of a pre-Celtic language and says that Celtic languages arrived in the Paleolithic.

Brythonic languages were probably spoken prior to the Roman invasion at least in the majority of Great Britain south of the rivers Forth and Clyde, though the Isle of Man later had a Goidelic language, Manx. Northern Scotland mainly spoke Pritennic, which became Pictish, that may have been a Brythonic language. The theory has been advanced (notably by T. F. O'Rahilly) that part of Ireland spoke a Brythonic language, usually termed Ivernic, before it was displaced by the Q-Celtic Irish language, although the authors Dillon and Chadwick reject this theory as being implausible.

During the period of the Roman occupation of Southern Britain (AD 43 to c. 410), Common Brythonic borrowed a large stock of Latin words, both for concepts unfamiliar in the pre-urban society of Celtic Britain, such as urbanisation and tactics of warfare, and for rather more mundane words which displaced native terms (most notably, the word for "fish" in all the Brythonic languages derives from the Latin piscis rather than the native *ēskos, which may survive, however, in the Welsh name of the River Usk, Wysg). Approximately 800 of these Latin loan-words have survived in the three modern Brythonic languages. Romano-British is the name for the Latinised form of the language used by Roman authors.

It is probable that at the start of the Post-Roman period Common Brythonic was differentiated into at least two major dialect groups – Southwestern and Western (in addition we may posit additional dialects, such as Eastern Brythonic, spoken in what is now Eastern England, which have left little or no evidence). Between the end of the Roman occupation and the mid 6th century the two dialects began to diverge into recognisably separate languages, the Western into Cumbric and Welsh, and the Southwestern into Cornish and its closely related sister language Breton, which was carried from the south west of Great Britain to continental Armorica. Jackson showed that a few of the dialect distinctions between West and Southwest Brythonic go back a long way. New divergencies began around AD 500 but other changes which were shared occurred in the 6th century. Other common changes occurred in the 7th century onward and are possibly due to inherent tendencies. Thus the concept of a common Brythonic language ends by AD 600. It is thought that substantial numbers of Britons remained in the expanding area controlled by Anglo-Saxons, but the only information on their language may be obtained from place names. Over time it is thought they gradually adopted the English language.

The Brythonic languages spoken in what is now Scotland, the Isle of Man and what is now England began to be displaced in the 5th century through the influence of Irish (Scots), Norse and Germanic invaders. The displacement of the languages of Brythonic descent was probably complete in all of this territory, (except Cornwall and the English counties bordering Wales), by the 11th century (date of extinction in various parts of the territory is debated).

The regular consonantal sound changes from Proto-Celtic to the Welsh language and Cornish language may be summarised in the following table. Where the Welsh and Cornish graphemes have a different value from the corresponding IPA symbols, the IPA equivalent is indicated between slashes. V represents a vowel; C represents a consonant.